Completeness of the Gaia-verse – I. When and where were Gaia’s eyes on the sky during DR2?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Gaia space mission is crafting revolutionary astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic catalogues that will allow us to map our Galaxy, but only if we know the completeness of this Gaia-verse of catalogues: what stars does it contain and what stars is it missing? We argue that the completeness is driven by Gaia’s spinning-and-precessing scanning law and will apply this principle to the Gaia-verse over this series. We take a first step by identifying the periods in time that did not contribute any measurements to Gaia DR2; these gaps create ribbons of incompleteness across the sky that will bias any study that ignores them, although some of these gaps may be filled in future data releases. Our first approach was to use the variable star photometry to identify the 94 gaps longer than 1 per cent of a day. Our second approach was to predict the number of observations of every point on the sky, which in comparison to the reported number of detections revealed additional gaps in the astrometry and spectroscopy. Making these predictions required us to make the most precise, publicly available determination of the Gaia scanning law. Using this scanning law, we further identified that most stars fainter than G = 22 in DR2 have spurious magnitudes due to a miscalibration resulting from a thunderstorm over Madrid. Our list of gaps and precision scanning law will allow astronomers to know when Gaia’s eye was truly on their binary star, exoplanet, or microlensing event during the time period of the second data release.